I've decided to use my monthly post to review books for children between about 5 and 12. Ish. So post picture books, and pre-teens. If anyone has recommendations/a book they'd like to put forward, please get in touch!
The first one I've chosen is I am Rebel, by Ross Montgomery. This is the Waterstones Children's Book of the Year, and comes bearing words of praise from such successful writers as Natasha Farrant, Abi Elphinstone and Katya Balen. (I do wonder a bit whether such plaudits are helpful or the reverse: they set the bar high. And anyway, how on earth do you settle on a book of the year? It's a big ask. But still...)
I am Rebel is set in an imaginary country, in a time which is something like our Middle Ages. The narrator is a dog. He belongs to a boy called Tom, who lives on a subsistence farm with his parents. Times are hard, in particular because the king keeps raising taxes. Tom is outraged by the unfairness of this, and when he meets a member of the rebel movement, he lies about his age and runs away to join it - leaving Rebel behind.
Rebel adores Tom, and is very happy with life as it is. As long as he is close to Tom, he is happy. So when Tom disappears, he is bereft, and decides that he must follow Tom and bring him home. The rest of the book is about his quest for Tom: inevitably he has adventures along the way, encountering all kinds of dangers, making new friends and learning about the world beyond the farm.
It's an exciting story, and it has the main prerequisite for success with young readers - it carries you along with it, it makes you keep turning the pages. Rebel is an engaging narrator, and a lot of humour is drawn from the gap between how he, as a faithful hound, sees the world, and how the various characters he encounters see him. By the end of the book, he's still the same Rebel, but he's learned a great deal.
It's an enjoyable adventure. Of course there are underlying messages - about freedom and tyranny, about the reality of war, about living in the wild versus living as a pet. But these emerge naturally from the story: there's no sense that they're imposed. Best of all - it's a good read!
2 comments:
Ooh this sounds interesting. Not what I had thought it would be about from seeing the cover advertised! I'd be interested in seeing pre-teen adventure fiction reviews, as that's where my writing is taking me just now.
Thanks for this review. I've seen 'Rebel' in shop windows and wondered about the storyline. The 'voice' of the dog clearly makes it worth reading and that setting sounds interesting.
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